Maple Samaras by Martin Settle

$15.00

Maple Samaras is a collection of poems about the persona hidden in the lives of trees. Martin Settle is a poet that has long loved and observed trees. Over the years, he has given each species a personality based on traits of bark, bough, behavior, leaves, and seeds. For Settle, sweet gum trees represent seedy neighbors; swamp cypresses are portrayed as voodoo women; and trees of heaven are immigrants who have the stamina to survive under the worst conditions. Reading these poems is both a delight in personification and a lesson in tree identification. As Settle says in his concluding poem, “take no path/ that does not pass a tree/ and you will never be lost.”

Description

Maple Samaras is a collection of poems about the persona hidden in the lives of trees. Martin Settle is a poet that has long loved and observed trees. Over the years, he has given each species a personality based on traits of bark, bough, behavior, leaves, and seeds. For Settle, sweet gum trees represent seedy neighbors; swamp cypresses are portrayed as voodoo women; and trees of heaven are immigrants who have the stamina to survive under the worst conditions. Reading these poems is both a delight in personification and a lesson in tree identification. As Settle says in his concluding poem, “take no path/ that does not pass a tree/ and you will never be lost.”

ISBN: 978-1-941374-01-6
Publication Date: April 25, 2018

Martin Settle is a poet and assemblage artist, who resides in Charlotte, NC. He has master degrees in English and Communications and has taught for 32 years, the last 17 of which were at UNC Charlotte.

In 2015 Main Street Rag published his book of poetry The Teleology of Dunes. His second book Coming to Attention: developing the habit of haiku (also by Main Street Rag) was released in September of 2016. Finally in 2017, Martin Settle published a third book called The Backbone Alphabet (Xlibris).